Chapter Text
1967
Every window in the cottage is wide open, yet the net curtains hang limply, undisturbed by even a tiny flutter of a breeze. Summer drags on and Mrs. Holmes – pregnant for the first time, overdue and over hot - is struggling to comprehend an academic article through the fog of heat and hormones. When her husband comes in to see if there’s anything he can do, she is – perhaps – a little bit short with him.
“WILL YOU STOP BEING SO SHEEPISH! IT’S LIKE YOU WANT TO APOLOGISE FOR CAUSING ALL OF THIS FUSS! YOU WEREN’T EXACTLY COMPLAINING DURING THE CONCEPTION! I’M HOT, GET ME TEA!!”
Her husband dashes off and she resorts to fanning herself with the befuddling academic article. It’s at the exact moment her husband returns with tea (and an apologetic biscuit) that her water breaks. There’s no time to even get to the car: it’s all over in thirty minutes, as if the child wanted the whole messy business done with as quickly as possible.
That is how Mycroft Holmes enters the world. So far he’s done it 788 times.
1987
Mycroft is old, even by the standard of ouroborans, but to understand that you have to understand them, and to understand them you have to understand his first death.
He is nineteen. He is a genius.
It’s not that no one understands him, he doesn’t even have that excuse. Mummy understands and Daddy is irritatingly supportive. People line up to give him jobs and awards…
…but being around people makes him feel physically sick. All their talk and their movement distracts him. People don’t stop moving and living and breathing and it makes him slow.
And they won’t leave him alone!
There’s no one else like him, nothing he wants from the world except peace and quiet…
He looks at his hand, where his Soulname is printed. People are so fascinated by the damn names on their hands. He wants nothing to do with his. Whoever ‘Greg’ is, he’s just another noise.
There’s nowhere to go. He doesn’t know what he wants from his life. He can’t make the world quiet.
Except in one way.
Mycroft Holmes dies alone, at university, his brain turning itself inside out. A bottle of painkillers and a bottle of vodka make the world go quiet.
Unfortunately for him the quiet doesn’t last.
1967
(Again)
The same net curtains hang in the window. The same heatwave bakes the house.
The same pregnant woman yells at her husband and, half an hour later, the same baby enters the world.
All is well for a while. Nothing changes from the first time this all happened – though perhaps this baby is more restless, quicker to learn to walk, and speeds through potty-training and weaning as if desperate to have it over with.
For three short years Mycroft is just a baby, but – in bits and pieces – memories start returning to the child, and then one morning he wakes up in his childish bed and remembers everything. He is three years old in body and twenty-two years old in mind.
He may be a genius, but who on earth could understand this?
The second life of an ouroboran is usually messy unless they are somehow discovered by others of their kind. These reborn humans are alone, confused, and traumatised. Mycroft was nineteen upon dying but most are – in their minds – at least eighty or ninety. They have had children. They have had soulmates. They have had achievements. And they wake up back at the start, with it all gone and the world reset.
Child suicide rates are very high in second lives. Those who live usually drive themselves wild, unable to let their first life go or searching for answers from god, science, and anyone else who might help them.
Mycroft lives out his second life out of sheer curiosity. He sees his family with grown-up eyes rather than childish ones, he looks for answers and finds other like him. When he dies – surprisingly early, 65, heart failure – he knows what is going to happen. He thinks he may never be truly surprised again.
1967
(Again. And Again. And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…)
It’s not until Mycroft’s 788th life that he is truly, gobsmackingly surprised by something.
He is 9 years old and also 50,000 years old.
His parents have just told him he is about to become a brother for the first time.
1976
William Holmes’s birth is so every-day as to be boring to anyone not closely connected to it. A January birth on a drizzly night, a trip to the hospital, and six hours of painful but undramatic labour.
Mycroft has spent six months puzzling out his new sibling’s existence. He thinks back to the time of the conception (and that’s a horrific thing to consider, even if you are millennia old) and concludes that there was nothing at all that could have altered the timeline so drastically as to cause this child to come into existence.
He is being looked after by his incredibly annoying Aunt Patricia who smells of rose perfume and is having a clichéd affair with her boss. She was unpleasant enough in his first life, and has not improved in the time since. They are sitting in the waiting room and Aunt Patricia occasionally tries to make chit-chat whenever Mummy’s shouting in the distance become too painful (or too rude.)
“You’re going to be a lovely big brother Mycy,” she chatters. “Mummy said you’ve been ever so excited. She said you’ve been hovering around her like a nanny these last few months.”
“Mmm,” Mycroft replies.
What if this baby is like him? It would explain the sudden change of the timeline and it would certainly make things interesting for a while. He’s already looking forward to seeing how the dynamics of his family – something he knows inside out – changes with this new life.
If the child is like him… well the idea of that makes him tremble with excitement. Because though there are other ouroborans - ones made brilliant through years of life and study – there aren’t any born geniuses, there aren’t any who understand what it is to live this existence continually fighting your own mind.
Perhaps this child won’t be an ouroboran, perhaps this child won’t be a genius, but there’s no denying it’s the most interesting thing to have happened to him since his second life, and the chance to experience what it is to be a brother is possibly the most precious gift he’s ever received.
Which is why, in that first life, mummy loves to tell the story of how ‘Myc’ reacted when presented with his new brother.
“It was adorable. He SOBBED. His little face was bright red with happiness and in the end we had to prise William out of his arms to stop him getting cried on!”
That night Mycroft grins to himself in bed, acting as giddy as the boy he still technically is.
He has a brother. His name is William Scott Holmes. The tiny Soulname on his hand says ‘John’.
And there’s a chance – a small, but nevertheless significant one – that Mycroft won’t have to be alone anymore.